Heavy Gear: Blitz! -Part I

I bought this.

So in a random fit of curiosity, I started looking into Heavy Gear: Blitz! (HGB, for short).  What is it?  It is a miniatures game set at 1:144 scale for (primarily) combined ground force combat.  The stars of the game are vehicles known as Gears.  They are capable of walking for well, for a lack of a better term roller skating across the surface of the far away and basically abandoned planet Terra Nova.  I like mechs, and was looking for random stuff to add to my cart on The Warstore and well, things just proceeded from there.

I will say, that I bought a copy of Locked and Loaded v1.1 (the rule book from 2009) some time back.  So I had read the rules once, and then became engrossed in the fiction.  I knew that a 3 gears on 3 gears two player intro was near useless, so I decided on the Northern Army Starter Kit.  It is a jam packed box as we'll get to in a bit.  The outward presentation is top notch.

 Here is the back of the box explaining in a nice clear type what is in the box, and how customizable it is.  Kinda handy actually.  That weapons chart there, is way more helpful than you can imagine at this point if you have no experience with HGB.

The sides of the box are given over the description and pictures of two of the three chassis you'll be assembling (a Jaguar and  Grizzly, poor Hunter got left out).

So what is it like opening a box? Well, first be aware for its size, it is pretty heavy, you get tons of stuff.

It all fits inside tightly.

Really simple, but wholly functional packing.

Now yo see that white slip there?  That is pretty much the only guidance you get.  Why two rule books? Well, here is the thing... That green and black rulebook is the complete, up to date rules set (with some extra handy stuff like errata to other books, etc.) and that pretty orange one is the old rule book with all the army lists for the main factions in it.  So from a value perspective, you get all the information you'll need.  The rule books are black and white, and sometimes the things that should be in color translate to grey scale very poorly and are very difficult to read.  It turns out much of that information is readily available on their website, but as a total newbie I didn't know that.  Actually, Dream Pod 9 (the manufacturer)  is approaching a Corvus Belli (Infinity) level customer interaction via the website.  The website however is not in the box.  They do heavily encourage you to go there on that white slip.

You also get two trays of five gears (one a Strike Group, the other a Fire Support Group), 2 dice and a little round tape measure.



The metal making the box so heavy.

 The gears' chassis themselves come in 5 or so pieces, with weapons and accessories adding a variable amount based on load out.

A grizzly Chassis (top) and a Jaguar Chassis (bottom).

So I decided to build the big guy, known as a Grizzly.  As I understand, these are the big guns of the Northern Coalition.  Their little data card is chocked full of stats for weapons, everything from a guided heavy mortar to a vibroblade.

Bits o' Grizzly.

As far as molding goes, it was a mixed bag.  The left leg was flawless, while the right legs had a nasty mold line right down the treads on the foot.  There was also some mild mold slippage on the same treads.  The rest of the pieces where fairly standard in quality, nothing glaring bad, but still required some attention and mild clean up. (Update: I decided to build the second Grizzly last night, and the leg had actually ripped in half at a thin joint, probably from being a space too small for it.)



After how many years of fixing GW and FoW treads, yet another game that has my pet peeve.



And other shoe drops...  proof they can in fact do it right.


So using my awesome modelling ability, I overcame these insurmountable difficulties and built a model just to see how it goes together and get a real sense of the scale.

A gadget for every occasion, see what I mean a real walking arsenal.

So the body of this thing was easy to build, as it has nice sockets and pins for everything to fit together.  That is when I cam to how to arm this thing.  Obviously you can't equip all that stuff at once, well that actually isn't all that obvious, but you can't.  Having no idea what exactly is good, or well rounded or what not I decided to build a stock Grizzly.  So off to the data cards in the back of the book.
(Update: it turns out, the white slip of paper actually recommends a congiuration for the Fire Support team)

Not for the visually impared.

 That little block of stats is what you have to go by, and in decent light in my basement it was hard to read.  The fact that it is dithered grey scale is think contributes heavily to that.  it turns out you can get nice full color cards for with this data from their website for free to print out.  That is awesome, actually; but, as a newbie I am just excited and building models with minimal direction.  So after return to the back of the sleeve, I find all those little parts except the thing labelled HMG.  HMG any war gamer will assume means heavy machine gun.  So I get out my Field Manual to confirm that I am correct, then I go looking for a picture of it.  There is an expanded reference with every weapon in the game in the Field Manual.  Not there.  Hmm, after a while I discovered there is an integrated HMG of the lower right torso.  Okay, so I lost 10 minutes of my life, but I gained an appreciation for how stuff works in this game.

Don't throw this away, you'll really need it when you start.

The hand weapons are added using the time honored tradition of chopping off the handle and placing on a closed fist that we all learned back in the day on our 1st-3rd edition space marine, and numerous conversion packs.  The main different here, you are glueing a very narrow tab into a very shallow slot.   My heavy autocannon thus droops a little, but given that it isn't really being aimed like person would it (the gear just carries it, and the fine adjustments are all done via senors and computers), I don't think it is a huge deal.  If I ever really get into this game, I'll probably go back and modify it.

So  I started with this...

and ended up with this...

These models are shown to scale, otherwise this would be a pointless picture.

So there you have it, the basis for my initial impression of the boxed starter army.  So here is my actual impression.

This is not for a wargaming newbie.  For many of the basics you are on your own.  The models will require some detailed cleaning, and installing the weapons systems will require rudimentary conversion skills.  Trying to determine weapons loadouts are difficult, but clearly doable.  Working you way better Feild Manual, Locked and Loaded (which contains obsolete rules in addition to the current army lists)and the internet can be frustrating and counter intuitive.  Really that white sheet need to be double sided or better yet a nice getting started pamplet explaining more.

For an experienced wargamer, things are different.  This is a god kit for the educated consumer.  Go online and read about what is in the kit, so when you get it you'll not be dazed by the "new and shiny".  Read the manual, learn the weapons and lay everythng out above and you'll generally be fine.  They give you tons of weapons options, so you can get the set, and reconfigure everything later.  This a very much a bits box game, and so far I have tons of left over stuff.  Maybe it will be like how everyone has tons of bolters laying around, I don't know yet.  The models themselelves are varied, adn with some planning you can mix and match the arms or do soem minor conversions to get some reallty nice poses.